The Anthropotekton

Abstract

Locating many of the contemporary architect’s flaws and shortcomings in its own process of becoming-subject, the Manual of the Anthropotekton aims at activating and situating the architectural student, practitioner, and educator in the position to launch an affirmative deconstruction of their own individuating Ego. This is accomplished through an exercise of semi-biographical introspection carried out by the author in which the ego’s structure along with its detrimental implications and inherent fragility is examined. A special emphasis is placed on the role that the ego plays in producing, via the consecration of authorship, the figure of the contemporary architect as a major obstacle for the productive and democratic proliferation of spatial knowledge, as well as one that perpetuates the extractivist and exploitative systems of economic and social production. This will lead to the proposal of an alternative construction of human subjectivity and, by extent, of the architect, that rejects the omnipotence of the architectural hero and embraces the notions of serendipity and the accident as the most important methodological drivers of sensible, suitable, and successful architectural interventions. By virtue of placing the accident in the foreground of architectural praxis, both the architect and its knowledge are liberated from the authorial chains of the ego, maximizing the proliferation of spatial strategies and the activation of local agents and communities, allowing for a collaborative, collective, inclusive and structural approach to any spatial conflict, which is much harder to provoke through traditional praxis. Lastly, a new partial axiomatic system based on a triple embodiment of presence is developed from within the subjectivity of the accident.